[TransOxus]

Europeans became exposed to the mysteries and knowledge of the East when they became Christians. Knowledge evolves. Over time, pilgrims to the Holy Land came back with new things and ideas. Tourism actually is an offshoot of pilgrimages. Trading to new areas grew but people were united in their faith. Then the Islamic scourge forced many from the civilized East to move into the backward areas of Europe. Then came Genghiz Khan whose might and descendants provided security and opened the trade routes such that there was increased trade and the flow of knowledge from the East to the West. The search for Prester John to free them from the Moors excited and fevered the minds of the backward Europeans leading to explorations of the new world. Then the availability of the printed Bible opened the eyes to many, and they began to question unscrupulous Church leaders. As we know the rest is history. All this didn't happen overnight but over hundreds of years

[Junior]

Your contention was that Christianity promoted advancement in the sciences. I've pointed out that science actually stagnated under Christianity. The Greeks and the Romans made great strides technologically in the centuries prior to the rise of Christianity. The Church came along and no technological progress was made stagnant for a thousand years. With the revival of the study of the Greeks and Romans, technological progress took off again. It wasn't called the Rennaissance for nothing. The Moslems had actually kept much of the Greek and Roman learning alive. Even after the West came in contact with that learning during the Crusades, it still took centuries for Western thought to overcome the cultural inertia imposed by the Church's static view of the universe.